September 4, 2015

UC Berkeley engineers have invented a new laser-ranging system that can reduce the power consumption, size, weight and cost of LIDAR (light detection and ranging, aka “light radar”), which is used in self-driving vehicles* to determine the distance to an object, and in real-time image capture for 3D videos.

“The advance could shrink components that now take up the space of a shoebox down to… read more

Design tool lets novices do in minutes what would take experts in computer-aided design hours

September 4, 2015

Researchers at MIT and the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya in Israel have developed a system that automatically turns CAD files into visual models that users can modify in real time, simply by moving virtual sliders on a Web page. Once the design meets their specifications, they can hit the print button to send it to a 3-D printer.

Currently, 3-D printing an object from any but the simplest designs requires… read more

September 3, 2015

GVU Center at Georgia Tech | A new Georgia Tech artificial intelligence system develops interactive stories through crowdsourced data for more robust fiction. Here (in a simplified example), the AI replicates a typical first date to the movies (user choices are in red), complete with loud theater talkers and the arm-over-shoulder movie move.

Georgia Institute of Technology researchers have developed a new artificially intelligent system that crowdsources plots… read more

Could allow for printing tissues loaded with pharmaceuticals or for use in biomedical implants and tissue engineering

September 3, 2015

Tufts University scientists have developed a silk-based bio-ink that could allow for printing tissues that could be loaded with pharmaceuticals, cytokines (for directing stem cell functions), and antibiotics (for controlling infections), for example, or used in biomedical implants and tissue engineering.

Current 3-D printing processes are limited to simple body parts such as bone. And most inks currently being developed for 3-D printing are made of thermoplastics, silicones, collagen,… read more

In 1998, athlete Mark Pollock became the first blind man to race to the South Pole; now "Iron ElectriRx" man is making history again --- in a robotic exoskeleton

September 2, 2015

A 39-year-old man who had been completely paralyzed for four years was able to voluntarily control his leg muscles and take thousands of steps in a “robotic exoskeleton” device during five days of training, and for two weeks afterward, UCLA scientists report.

This is the first time that a person with chronic, complete paralysis has regained enough voluntary control to actively work with a robotic device designed… read more

September 2, 2015

The good news: as for 2013, global life expectancy for people in 188 countries has risen 6.2 years since 1990 (65.3 to 71.5). The bad news: healthy life expectancy (HALE) at birth rose by only 5.4 years (56.9 to 62.3), due to fatal and nonfatal ailments (interactive visualization by country here).

In other words, people are living more years with illness and disability. Ischemic heart disease, lower… read more

September 1, 2015

A new wireless communication technique that works by sending magnetic signals through the human body could offer a lower power and more secure way to communicate information between wearable electronic devices than Bluetooth, according to electrical engineers at the University of California, San Diego.

While this work is still a proof-of-concept demonstration, researchers envision developing it into an ultra-low-power wireless system that can easily transmit… read more

September 1, 2015

A team of researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has developed a hybrid system that produces hydrogen and uses it (via microbes) to synthesize carbon dioxide into methane, the primary constituent of natural gas.

“We can expect an electrical-to-chemical efficiency of better than 50 percent and a solar-to-chemical energy conversion efficiency of 10 percent if our system is coupled with state-of-art solar panel and electrolyzer,”… read more